When I think about growth investing, I often picture the final outcome — the big deal, capital deployed, a company that scales, or the exit that gets celebrated. But behind every investment is something much more human: relationships, judgment, patience, and thousands of small decisions that compound over time.

< Download the full interview here >

I recently sat down with a growth investor to talk about what the role actually looks like beyond sourcing and deploying capital. What stood out to me most was the emphasis on curiosity, humility, and the ability to recognize what you don’t know.

Great investing is not about having every answer. It’s about asking better questions, understanding people, and knowing when to lean in or step back.

One of my favorite insights from the conversation was that private markets require you to “earn the right to invest.” Unlike public markets, where opportunities are often readily available, relationships are built long before a deal happens. The work begins with trust.

The same applies to leadership, creativity, and building anything meaningful. The strongest outcomes rarely come from a single decision. They come from consistent effort, thoughtful relationships, and the ability to keep moving forward through uncertainty.

This conversation offers a thoughtful look into the realities of growth investing — the work that happens behind the scenes and the mindset required to build conviction over time.

< Download the full interview here >

Stay Wild,
Adeline

An assumption woven into modern life is that nature exists somewhere beyond us.

Nature is the place we escape to after work, the destination we seek on weekends, and the landscape that appears outside the window once the city gives way to mountains, forests, or coastline. Even our language reflects that separation. We speak of going into nature, as though we spend the rest of our lives somewhere else. Yet nothing we design has ever existed outside of it.

The buildings we inhabit, the materials we specify, the products we manufacture, and the technology that fills our daily lives all begin with the same earth we often describe as separate from ourselves. Design has never operated independently of nature. If anything, it has always been one of the many ways we participate in reshaping it. (Hello, biomimicry. And a shout out to Antoni Gaudí, who executed on the belief that nature was not simply inspiration—it was instruction.) This relationship has become impossible to ignore.

Across the world, landscapes are changing in ways that no longer feel abstract. Fire seasons begin earlier, burn longer, and spread farther. Manhattan floods with a frequency that once would have seemed slightly rare. Entire communities are forced to adapt to conditions that would have previously been described as exceptional. These moments invite conversations about climate science, policy, and infrastructure, all of which are essential. They also invite a quieter question about the role design has played in shaping the relationship between people and the world that sustains them.

For decades, our profession has measured success by our ability to improve experiences. We have learned how to remove friction, increase efficiency, simplify complexity, and encourage action. Those contributions have changed industries and improved countless aspects of daily life. At the same time, nature seems to be asking something different of us. Not through subtle reminders, but through increasingly difficult ones. It is asking us to recognize a responsibility that has been quietly waiting beside the others all along.

Share

Every object, service, and system communicates what we value.

It teaches us what deserves to be convenient, what should be replaced instead of repaired, what we treat as disposable, and what we choose to preserve. These decisions rarely attract attention on their own, yet over time they begin to shape culture. They influence how people interact with products and how they understand their relationship with the world around them.

To me, this feels like one of the most overlooked responsibilities in design, precisely because its scale makes it difficult to know where to begin.

I want to be clear: I am not suggesting that designers can solve a changing climate on their own. But design has always been about influencing behavior. If our work can encourage people to adopt new technologies, trust unfamiliar brands, or change long-standing habits, it can also help cultivate a deeper sense of care for the environments that make those lives possible in the first place.

The kind of work I hope to contribute to is design that reminds us we have never stood apart from nature to begin with. Long before we designed products, we learned from ecosystems. They taught us that nothing exists in isolation, that every system depends on another, and that resilience is rarely the result of one extraordinary part but of many working together.

What if the future of design begins with remembering something we have always known: we are designing within the world, not for it?

Stay Wild,
Adeline

It has become remarkably easy to create.

A decade ago, building a product, launching a business, or publishing an idea often required a collection of people with specialized expertise. Today, one person can generate copy, design a logo, build a website, automate a marketing campaign, and launch to thousands of people without ever leaving their desk. The barriers that once slowed creation have largely disappeared.

The result is a landscape where more information, products, and ideas are competing for the same finite resource: our attention.

I don’t believe easier access to creation is inherently a problem. In fact, access to better tools has opened the door for ideas that may never have existed otherwise. Small businesses can compete with established companies, and independent creators can build careers without waiting for permission. More people now have the opportunity to contribute something meaningful.

What interests me is what happens after that door opens.

When nearly anyone can create, the conversation shifts from Can we? to Should we? Not because new ideas are unwelcome, but because every new product, campaign, newsletter, or platform asks something of another person. It asks for time, curiosity, attention, and a willingness to pause what they were already doing and decide that this, among everything else competing for their attention, is worth engaging with.

For designers and strategists, that feels like an important distinction.

Our profession has become exceptionally good at helping brands earn attention. We understand positioning, storytelling, behavioral psychology, and the mechanics of digital experiences. We know how to reduce friction, improve conversion, and increase engagement. Those are valuable skills, but I sometimes wonder if they have quietly replaced a more important question.

Are we designing experiences because they genuinely solve a problem for someone, or because we know how to create enough momentum to keep people looking? The two are not always the same.

The brands I continue to admire are rarely the ones asking for the most attention. They are the ones that understand the responsibility that comes with receiving it. They have taken the time to understand a specific frustration, remove unnecessary complexity, or make a difficult decision feel clearer than it did before.

Maybe this has always been the real work of design. Not creating more things for people to consume, but creating fewer things that are genuinely worth their time.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

Some conversations feel effortless while others seem to require work. It is rarely because one person has more to say than the other. More often, I believe it comes down to pace. One person processes information slowly, asking questions as they go. Another reaches a conclusion almost immediately. One fills silence with ideas, while the other needs silence before the ideas arrive. Neither approach is right or wrong, but they create different rhythms for how decisions are made.

I have started to wonder if brands operate in much the same way.

When talking about “brand strategy”, a great deal of time is dedicated to discussing positioning, messaging, visual identity, and customer personas. Those conversations are necessary, yet they often overlook something much quieter: the rhythm of the experience itself. How quickly does someone encounter new information? How much space is there to absorb it? Does the copy invite reflection, or does it create momentum? Does the website ask visitors to make a decision before they have had the opportunity to build confidence?

Share

These are questions about human behavior.

Every audience develops a pattern for how it gathers information and arrives at trust. Someone purchasing a nutritional supplement is unlikely to move through a website in the same way as someone buying a concert ticket. One decision is built on reassurance, transparency, and evidence. The other may be driven by excitement and immediacy. Asking both audiences to move through the same experience ignores the different rhythms behind their decision-making.

This is where I think many brands unintentionally create friction. They design experiences around how they want to communicate rather than how their audience naturally processes information. The result is rarely dramatic, but appears in smaller moments: copy that feels rushed, a call-to-action that arrives too early, or a website that introduces complexity before establishing clear communication.

Rhythm is difficult to measure, which may be why it receives so little attention. Yet it shapes almost every interaction we have with a brand. It influences whether information feels overwhelming or reassuring, a conversation feels transactional or thoughtful, and if trust has enough room to develop before a decision is expected.

THE GAP

Understanding an audience extends beyond knowing what they value. It requires paying attention to the rhythm with which they gather information, build confidence, and reach a decision. When a brand ignores that rhythm, it creates a gap between intention and experience.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

I believe the mythology around startup founders often begins with invention. When I was in college I had always pictured the breakthrough product, the late-night whiteboard session, the singular flash of insight that births an idea into a reality. Yet listening to one founder describe his work, it became clear that the role has far less to do with invention than with initiation.

His title is CEO and cofounder, but Daniel Mason does not define himself by hierarchy or management. He defines himself as the person who starts things: the vision, the product, the culture, the hiring process and the search for capital. Then, eventually, much of it is handed to people who can execute those systems at greater scale.

There is something unexpectedly temporary in that description to me. At a younger age I often imagined leadership as “control”, but starting a company requires comfort with creating something and then loosening your grip on it. The rhythm of the work itself appears less glamorous than many people would expect. There is no universal formula for a successful week because every week arrives with different demands. Instead, he relies on a simple set of questions: What needs to start? What needs to improve? What needs to end?

The questions feel deceptively small and yet they suggest something larger about leadership: progress is often less about adding than it is about editing.

< Read the Full Interview Here >

What struck me most was the repeated return to accountability. Entrepreneurship is frequently sold as independence, but founders may be signing up for something closer to obligation. The moment money enters the picture, so do expectations as investors expect returns—the strings attached. Employees expect direction and the customers expect trust. Freedom, in that sense, comes with a ledger.

Perhaps this is why so many founders describe the experience as lonely due to no built-in support system. Difficult decisions eventually find their way back to a single person: the one who delivers hard news, closes doors, or decides when an idea no longer deserves to survive.

What I loved about the conversation is that Daniel offered a kind of advice that felt less like business strategy and more like a reminder for living: enjoy the journey and not only the destination. If the work exists solely to arrive somewhere else, disappointment may be waiting at the finish line. Because in the end, starting something appears to be less about reaching a place than remaining willing to begin again the next morning.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

Every day when I go on my walk, I love experiencing small interactions with complete strangers and being reminded that every person walking around is carrying a brand, whether they intended to build one or not.

Some arrive there accidentally, while others inherit it through family expectations, workplaces, culture, social norms, or the thousands of invisible messages absorbed over time. Somewhere along the way, we begin collecting identities like souvenirs: successful person, agreeable person, productive person, practical person, attractive person, responsible person. We wear them long enough that eventually they stop feeling borrowed. The strange thing is that many of us never stop to ask whether we actually chose them.

We live in a world that is remarkably efficient at feeding us instructions. What “success” looks like: climbing the corporate ladder, even within systems willing to replace us overnight. What “beauty” looks like: polished standards, filters, and curated versions of ourselves that slowly distort what is natural. What a life is supposed to look like: college, work, marriage, children, retirement. What ambition looks like: long hours and full calendars without much space to pause and ask what we are actually working toward. What love looks like: co-dependence rather than two people committed to speaking honestly and meeting one another there.

Yet there is an entirely different opportunity available to us. We can become selective about what we consume rather than unconsciously absorbing everything placed in front of us. We can decide what shapes us and, in turn, how we shape the world around us through what we pay attention to and what we choose to share.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Bonnie Wan, author of The Life Brief: A Playbook for No-Regrets Living. What struck me was that the conversation did not feel like a discussion about goals or optimization. It felt more like excavation. Her work centers around drawing out parts of ourselves that often become buried beneath expectation, obligation, and inherited definitions of who we should be.

Because perhaps personal branding is not really about creating ourselves at all but rather it is about remembering ourselves.

Subscribe now

For anyone beginning their own journey, these five questions from Bonnie’s book are a powerful starting place:

What do I deeply want?
Not what sounds impressive or what makes sense on paper.

When do I feel most alive?
Pay attention to energy as it tends to tell the truth faster than logic does.

What parts of myself have I edited out?
Many people become excellent at fitting in and forget what they removed to do it.

Whose expectations am I carrying?
Some ambitions belong to us while others arrive as hand-me-downs.

If there were no audience, what would I choose?
An uncomfortable question with a habit of producing honest answers.

Brands differentiate themselves through voice, values, and perspective. Humans are no different. We all have our own flavor; the challenge is allowing ourselves the chance to taste it.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

There is a particular kind of branding that does not ask for applause because it understands that confidence and volume have never been the same thing. Some brands spend years trying to convince us they matter. The memorable ones simply make our lives easier.

Seed belongs in that category (shout out to Mouthwash Studio for the incredible work behind the brand).

In a health and wellness industry crowded with miracle claims, endless powders, neon labels, and packaging that often resembles a chemistry experiment disguised as self-care, Seed feels surprisingly restrained. Its language is straightforward, its visual systems feel intentional, and its educational content never leaves you feeling as though you accidentally enrolled in a graduate biology course. What makes the brand compelling is not simply the product itself, but the discipline behind how the entire experience has been designed.

Five principles stand out, and they extend far beyond wellness.

Clarity creates trust.
Seed does not confuse complexity with intelligence. Health science is layered and nuanced, yet the brand translates information into language and visual systems people can actually understand. People rarely invest in what they cannot grasp.

Education is part of the product.
Their infographics do not feel decorative; they perform a job. They remove friction, answer questions, and help people feel informed rather than persuaded. The best brands teach.

Consistency builds memory.
Across packaging, typography, website design, and messaging, there is a calm rhythm. Every touchpoint feels connected, as though it belongs to the same conversation.

Packaging communicates values before words do.
The reusable glass container and refill system quietly communicate care and intention. People notice when actions and values align.

Thoughtfulness scales better than trends.
Trends tend to age like milk. Thoughtful systems age like architecture. Seed feels built with intention rather than decorated for attention.

Good branding often receives praise for looking beautiful. Memorable branding creates relief by removing noise and building trust.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

There is a strange moment that happens after design school—or after shifting into any design-centered career—when you realize that being good at design and knowing how to work as a designer are often two different things.

You learn how to make things. You learn principles, process, software, critique. But then you step into real projects and discover that much of the work exists in places that are harder to teach.

You sit in meetings and wonder what questions you should actually be asking. You open a file and try to understand where to begin. You navigate shifting priorities, personalities, feedback, ambiguity, and business realities. You realize that what is missing is often not talent. It is language, structure, and context.

That is why I created Your Best Friend (as a Designer).
< download the free document here >

I built it as a practical guide for the things I have learned inside real projects—the thinking that sits underneath strong design work but often goes unspoken. Not only how to make something, but how to understand what a project is actually asking for. How to move between people, ideas, and business context. How to communicate thinking in a way others can follow. How to bring structure to complexity without making it heavier than it needs to be.

Because most of design is not the making itself, but rather it is everything that happens before and around it.

I made this for the person stepping into their first design role, but also for anyone entering work that asks them to think creatively, navigate ambiguity, and make sense of moving parts. I wanted to build the thing I wish someone had handed me earlier—a reference point for the moments where you think: I know I can do this. I just need help understanding how this world works.

Stay Wild,

Adeline

I believe that much of what shapes how people think today no longer happens in isolation or even in sustained conversation. It happens in fragments, mediated through screens that sit inches from the face, guiding attention downward with such consistency that the posture of modern life has quietly changed. Humanity has developed an almost reflexive relationship with its digital devices, a constant reaching, checking, and returning that leaves little room for ideas to stretch beyond their initial form (guilty over here).

For me, the most clarifying and grounding moments arrive when that pattern is interrupted.

There are times when I leave my phone behind on a walk, not as a gesture of discipline, but simply to remember what it feels like to move through the world without a secondary layer of interpretation, or what can feel like a phantom limb. What becomes immediately noticeable is not silence, but detail. The way light settles differently depending on the time of day, the pace and rhythm of people moving through space, the ordinary simplicity of cars stopping at a red light. There is so much to see when the downward pull is removed, so much of life that does not announce itself through a notification.

Subscribe now

It is in contrast to this habitual narrowing of attention that thought partners take on a particular importance.

They are not simply people who offer agreement or feedback, but those who intervene in the natural compression of perspective that happens when thinking becomes too self-contained or too reinforced by familiar inputs. In conversation with them, assumptions begin to loosen, and ideas that once felt concrete start to soften. Questions appear as openings into spaces that were not previously considered.

Increasingly, some of the most valuable exchanges I have had come from people whose daily worlds look nothing like my own. A designer speaking with a fitness instructor, a tech founder listening to an architect, a coder learning from someone whose work exists entirely outside the logic of technology. These encounters matter because they are not governed by the same constraints or assumptions. They introduce friction where there was only familiarity.

Ideas do not remain unchanged when they are carried across contexts. They expand, shift, and sometimes lose their original shape entirely, replaced by something less certain, but more useful.

What emerges is a simple but often overlooked reality: what humanity is capable of building is not determined solely by individual intelligence or isolated creativity, but by the quality of attention shared between people willing to question each other without collapsing too quickly into agreement.

And sometimes, the most important role a thought partner plays is not to offer direction or resolution, but to restore a sense of scale to thinking that has quietly become too small to notice its own limits.

Stay Wild,

Adeline

For much of our careers, creativity is measured by output.

The designer creates the design. The writer writes the copy. The strategist develops the idea. Success is tied to what we can personally produce, and the stronger the thinking or execution, the greater the perceived value.

Yet somewhere along the path toward leadership, that equation begins to change.

< Download the full interview here >

In a recent conversation with Nicholas Rotondi, Head of Creative at Manifest, I was struck by how little we spoke about creativity itself. We discussed agency life, client relationships, team dynamics, and the realities of creative leadership, but the recurring theme was not creative excellence. It was trust.

Again and again, our conversation returned to the same idea: the higher you rise in creative leadership, the less your role becomes about generating creative work and the more it becomes about creating the conditions in which creative work can thrive.

This shift can be difficult because the skills that help someone become a strong creative are not always the same skills that make them an effective leader. Early success is often built on having strong opinions and a clear point of view. Leadership, however, asks something different. It requires the ability to step back, create space for other perspectives, and recognize that the best outcome may not always come from your own ideas.

Subscribe now

Rotondi spoke about the importance of understanding when to compromise, a lesson that feels increasingly relevant in an industry that often celebrates conviction above all else. Compromise is frequently mistaken for lowering standards, when in reality it can be an acknowledgment that great work is rarely the product of a single perspective. The challenge is not deciding whether to care deeply about the work. It is learning when your attachment to a particular solution is serving the project and when it is simply serving your ego.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as teams grow. At a certain point, success depends on your ability to scale through others. The work shifts from creating to enabling. Instead of asking, “What is the best idea?” the question becomes, “How do I create an environment where the best ideas can emerge?”

The answer, according to Rotondi, begins with trust.

When discussing what makes a client truly collaborative, he described trust not as passive approval but as informed confidence. The strongest partnerships are built when clients provide clarity around the goal while trusting experts to determine the path forward. They understand that collaboration does not require participation in every decision. It requires alignment, communication, and a shared belief that each person involved brings valuable expertise to the process.

Share

The same principle applies to leadership.

Teams rarely produce their strongest work in environments where every decision must be approved, defended, or justified. People do their best work when they feel trusted, supported, and respected for the expertise they bring.

Perhaps that is the biggest misconception about creative leadership. The title often creates the image of someone directing every idea and shaping every outcome. In reality, the role becomes less about personal creative expression and more about leadership, communication, and stewardship. Success is measured less by what you personally create and more by what becomes possible through the people around you.

There is a certain irony in that transformation. Many creatives spend years pursuing leadership because they love making the work, only to discover that leadership requires a fundamentally different relationship with it.

Perhaps the real evolution of creative leadership is not becoming the most creative person in the room, but becoming the person who makes creativity possible for everyone else.

< Download the full interview here >

Stay Wild,
Adeline

I’ve been thinking about the kinds of conversations that stay with me long after they end.

The conversations that matter most are rarely the ones where I arrive certain of what I think. They tend to unfold when I enter a conversation with a kind of openness, as if I’m willing to set aside what I already know in order to actually hear what is being offered back to me—as a genuine willingness to be changed by what I encounter.

Recently, I had a conversation where I was given feedback in a very direct way. There wasn’t much cushioning around it, just a clear reflection of how my ideas were being received. My instinct was to hold onto what I had already built in my mind, to preserve the structure of my thinking as it was forming. But I stayed with the discomfort long enough to let it land without immediately reshaping it into something more comfortable.

What I noticed in that moment was how quickly some of my own ideas began to feel less necessary and somewhat no longer fully alive. They had served a purpose in how I was thinking, but they didn’t hold up once they were met by a perspective I hadn’t fully considered.

That experience made something very clear to me. There is something important about being able to disagree with your own ideas as they are forming. It is a way of staying honest with your thinking as it evolves, rather than protecting it simply because it is yours. When you can question your own conclusions in real time, your thinking stays responsive instead of fixed.

Subscribe now

I grew up with a belief that knowledge was something that needed to be demonstrated in order to be trusted. Especially as a woman, there was a subtle pressure to arrive already certain, already articulated, already prepared to defend what I thought. The more composed my thinking appeared, the more credibility it seemed to carry.

But over time, I’ve found that presence in a room doesn’t come from how complete your thinking is. It comes from how willing you are to stay close to what is still forming. There is a steadiness in curiosity that doesn’t rely on certainty, but instead on a consistent return to what you value and how you choose to engage with what you are hearing.

When thinking is guided by principle rather than certainty, it becomes easier to let ideas change without feeling like you are losing your ground. You can adjust, refine, and even discard parts of your thinking without it becoming an identity shift. The foundation stays intact because it is not built on being right, but on being honest about what you are seeing in real time.

THE GAP:

What I am learning is that ideas don’t need to be held tightly in order to matter. They need to be held clearly enough to be examined, and lightly enough to evolve. And in that space, thinking becomes something alive again, something shaped through conversation rather than defended against it.

Design, leadership, and business all depend on the same discipline: not falling in love with the first version of your thinking. The more space there is to disagree early, the more integrity there is in what eventually gets built.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

Every day, we move through our own unfolding journey without ever fully holding onto the thread of how we arrived at where we are. There is a kind of quiet blur to it, the way moments stack themselves into a path we recognize only in hindsight. We remember milestones, sometimes turning points, but the in-between is often softened, almost erased by the momentum of simply continuing forward.

And yet, I find myself constantly noticing the design of other people’s journeys.

In small, ordinary moments, I catch myself interacting with a product, sitting down at a restaurant, or walking through a museum and wondering about the intent behind what has been shaped for me. There is a subtle curiosity that sits underneath it all. I wonder what the journey was meant to feel like. I am curious if I started in the right place, or if I missed something that would have shifted my understanding of everything that followed. I ponder if this is the dish that is meant to open my palate before what comes next, or if the rim of this bowl was intentionally shaped for that final bite when the fork and knife are no longer enough and instinct takes over.

These details feel small, but they hold an entire philosophy of attention.

What becomes even more fascinating is how humans move through decisions in their own work and lives. Where we choose to spend our time, how long we linger on one task versus another, and the quiet divergence of process that still somehow leads to the same outcome. There is something deeply human in the way two people can arrive at identical results through completely different internal pathways, shaped by experience, instinct, and invisible preferences that rarely get named.

This is where I believe that journey mapping becomes such an extraordinary tool.

When someone starts mapping a user journey, they are not just documenting steps but tracing emotion through structure, watching where energy expands and where it quietly contracts. Transparent moments of friction appear as friction but then as a signal. Somewhere in that mapping process, productivity stops being the center of the conversation and the emotional residue of each moment becomes the real material you are working with.

And then there is what I keep coming back to most often.

THE GAP

The space between the beginning of a process and the experience of what that process actually feels like. That gap is where so much of design either succeeds or quietly breaks down. Where intention either translates into something felt, or dissolves into something merely functional. It is also where people decide, often without realizing it, whether something feels intuitive, considered, or completely misaligned with their expectation of being held through the experience.

The beginning of a process is never just a starting point, but a promise about everything that follows. And when that promise is unclear, or misaligned, or overly assumed, the entire experience shifts in ways that are difficult to recover from later on.

This is what keeps me interested in journeys, not as diagrams or frameworks, but as living sequences of perception. Because underneath every system, every product, every environment we move through, there is always a human trying to make sense of how they were meant to move through it in the first place.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

The average adult spends roughly 1,700 hours a year on the job, according to OECD data. For many of us, work occupies more of our waking life than almost any other activity.

Given how much of our lives unfold within our working environments, I find it surprising how little attention we give to the quality of that experience. We talk about productivity, efficiency, performance, goals, growth, and outcomes. Yet one of the qualities that has the greatest ability to shape how people feel around one another rarely enters the conversation at all: playfulness.

Recently, I have been working with a client whose meetings have become one of the highlights of my week.Before we discuss timelines, deliverables, or project updates, we begin somewhere else entirely with questions like: “What brought you joy this week?”, “What made you laugh recently?”, and “What is something unexpectedly delightful that happened today?” The questions are simple, yet they change the entire tone of the conversation.

Subscribe now

Instead of defaulting to “How are you?”—a question that often invites an automatic response—we are immediately invited into something more specific, more human, and more memorable. Within minutes, we are sharing stories, laughing, and discovering things about one another that would never emerge through a standard business agenda. Every time it happens, I leave wondering the same thing: When did playful curiosity become something we outgrew?

As children, curiosity was our default setting. We asked questions without worrying whether they were productive. We explored ideas without knowing where they would lead. We followed interests simply because they were interesting. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to associate seriousness with professionalism and playfulness with distraction. Yet the older I get, the more convinced I become that the opposite may be true.

Share

Playfulness creates the conditions for trust, curiosity opens the door to connection, and laughter lowers our defenses. Together, they make room for the kinds of conversations that help people feel seen rather than simply managed. This feels particularly important right now. We are living through a moment when it is easy to become consumed by outrage, anxiety, and endless information. Staying informed and paying attention matters, but so does remembering that we have the ability to shape the atmosphere around us.

I believe every interaction contributes something. A conversation can leave a person feeling heavier or lighter, more disconnected or more connected, guarded or more open. Anger and fear tend to narrow our thinking, making us easier to predict. Creativity, curiosity, and playfulness expand our thinking, making room for new possibilities.

Perhaps the question is not whether play belongs in our workplaces, communities, and relationships. Maybe the better question is why we stopped making room for it. Because if we spend so much of our lives working, shouldn’t we be more intentional about creating environments where people can experience joy, wonder, and genuine connection alongside accomplishment?

THE GAP

The gap may be simpler than we think: it starts with how we choose to engage one another. Every day presents dozens of opportunities to create a different kind of interaction, beginning with a more curious question. Instead of asking someone how they are, we can all try asking:

• What made you laugh recently?

• What is something small that brought you joy this week?

• What are you unexpectedly excited about right now?

• What is something you’ve become curious about lately?

• What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned this month?

Questions like these create openings, invite stories, and reveal the person behind the role, title, or responsibility. And maybe that is where playful curiosity has always done its best work—not in making life less serious, but in helping us remember that being human together matters just as much as being productive.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with being the person everyone looks to for certainty.

From the outside, leadership is often associated with confidence, decisiveness, ambition, and scale. Internally, it can feel far more complicated. Beneath the momentum of building a company are quieter realities that rarely make it into founder narratives: fear, self-doubt, emotional exhaustion, and the invisible responsibility of carrying other people’s livelihoods while trying to hold yourself together at the same time.

< Read the full conversation here >

In this month’s conversation, I spoke with a founder turned leadership coach, Tracy Lawrence, who has lived both sides of that experience. After raising more than $40 million and leading a high-growth company through intense periods of scaling, her work today looks very different. Rather than teaching founders how to move faster, she helps them slow down enough to understand what is actually driving their decisions.

What stayed with me most from our conversation was her perspective on clarity, not as productivity or optimization, but as honesty. Honesty about our values, our avoidance patterns, our deeper longings, and the kind of life we are building underneath the title.

We talked about the hidden emotional cost of leadership, the startup industry’s normalization of burnout, and the misconception that being “nice” automatically makes someone a good leader. She spoke candidly about the danger of avoiding difficult conversations, the importance of boundaries, and why so much dysfunction inside companies comes from unspoken truths.

There was also a deeper conversation woven throughout the interview around identity. At one point, she described realizing that her entire life had become organized around work until love interrupted that pattern and forced her to reconsider what fulfillment actually looked like outside of achievement.

Her definition of sustainable leadership was simple, but difficult: love and excellence existing together at the same time. High standards paired with honesty, care, accountability, and humanity.

I left the conversation thinking about how many people are quietly succeeding externally while feeling disconnected internally. Perhaps the next generation of leadership will not be defined by how much someone can endure, but by how truthful they are willing to become with themselves and the people around them.

< Read the full conversation here >

Stay Wild,

Adeline

For the better part of the last decade, I have become increasingly aware of how difficult it has become for people to simply be present with one another. Not the performative kind of presence, or passive listening, or the kind of attention that lingers on a phone resting face-up on the table, ready to interrupt at any moment, but actual presence — the kind that allows someone to fully absorb a conversation, a room, a piece of music, or another human being without instinctively reaching for distraction.

I think about this most vividly in moments that once felt effortless. I miss going to concerts where phones are not raised in the air, where people are not documenting the experience, but instead moving with each other, fully inside the music and the shared energy of the room.

TLDR:

People are increasingly struggling to be fully present with one another as cultural conditioning, shaped by constant digital stimulation, has shifted attention away from reflection and toward reaction. Phones and endless streams of content have made silence uncomfortable and distraction automatic, leading to fragmented attention in everyday interactions—from meetings to social spaces to live music experiences. As a result, connection feels thinner, listening less deep, and shared moments more mediated than lived. The essay argues that presence has become both rarer and more essential: a form of quiet resistance that restores depth to conversation, creativity, and human experience by choosing attention over distraction and participation over documentation.

FOR THOSE WILLING TO STAY PRESENT:

What feels most concerning is not necessarily technology itself, but the cultural conditioning surrounding it. We are living in an era that subtly rewards reaction over reflection. Everything is immediate. Opinions are formed instantly, conversations are interrupted constantly, and silence has become something many people instinctively try to escape. The second there is a lull at dinner, in a meeting, in line for coffee, or standing alone at a bar, people reach for their phones almost automatically, as though every unfilled moment requires stimulation.

Over time, I think this has fundamentally altered the way people engage with one another in public spaces. There was once a greater openness to observation, spontaneity, and interaction — an ability to sit in the energy of a room and allow something unexpected to unfold. Now, many environments feel partially disconnected, filled with people who are physically present but mentally elsewhere, filtering their attention between the real world and the endless pull of whatever exists behind the screen.

I notice this especially in professional settings. In my experience, the quality of a meeting changes entirely depending on whether the people involved are actually listening. There is a substantial difference between hearing someone speak and being fully engaged in what is trying to be built collectively. A phone in hand, even momentarily, shifts the dynamic. Attention fragments. Conversations lose depth. People miss nuance. Creativity suffers because the room is no longer operating from a place of full participation.

Subscribe now

To me, presence has become an essential part of meaningful collaboration. In fact, I have started to believe that some version of a “no phones in meetings” boundary should be normalized, not as a rigid rule, but as a sign of respect for the conversation itself. If the goal is to create thoughtful work, solve problems, exchange ideas, or genuinely understand one another, then attention matters. Listening matters. The energy people bring into a room matters.

The same principle extends far beyond work. It exists in restaurants where couples sit across from one another scrolling in silence. It exists in bars where groups gather together but remain tethered to entirely different digital worlds. And perhaps nowhere is it more visible than on the dance floor, where experiences that were once immersive and communal are increasingly mediated through a camera lens.

There is something strangely detached about watching an entire crowd experience music through their phones instead of through their bodies. Bright screens rise into the air, blocking the stage, documenting moments for audiences online rather than fully participating in the experience unfolding in real time. Somewhere along the way, the instinct shifted from feeling the moment to capturing proof that the moment happened.

But music was never meant to be consumed that way. Live music, especially, is visceral. It is collective. It is supposed to move through people physically and emotionally. The best nights are rarely the ones perfectly archived on social media; they are the ones where people forgot to check their phones because they were too immersed in what was happening around them.

Maybe this perspective sounds old-fashioned, but I do not think the issue is nostalgia. I think it is about remembering what makes human experiences meaningful in the first place. Presence is not simply about putting a phone away. It is about allowing ourselves to fully inhabit our lives while they are actually happening. It is about resisting the constant pressure to document, compare, react, and consume long enough to genuinely connect — with people, with ideas, with music, with conversation, and with ourselves.

THE GAP

Lately, I have started to feel that real presence is a gap and has become somewhat rebellious. In a culture built to fracture attention, choosing to fully listen to someone is powerful. Choosing to stay in the silence instead of escaping it is powerful. Choosing to experience something without immediately packaging it for public consumption is powerful.

And perhaps that is the direction more of us are craving, whether we realize it or not: a return to deeper attention, more intentional interaction, and experiences that are fully lived instead of partially observed through a screen. Presence, in its simplest form, may be one of the most valuable things we still have left to offer each other.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

I truly believe every engagement starts with compassion.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how many people move through moments of uncertainty alone. Whether it’s starting a new job, interviewing for different roles, building new relationships, or walking into unfamiliar systems and trying to understand how to succeed within them. There is often an invisible pressure to “just figure it out.”

I know that feeling well.

My path has been deeply non-linear, and because of that, I have had to navigate a wide range of onboarding experiences, team dynamics, and environments where the expectations were not always clear. There were moments I genuinely wondered if I was the wrong person for the role, or not skilled enough to be there. Over time, I began noticing something: the moments that changed everything were rarely about talent. They were about someone taking the time to create clarity, context, encouragement, or trust.

These moments made an imprint and It’s what eventually led me to build something—a tool grounded in a simple question: what would it look like to make the path a little less isolating for someone else? As an act of passing knowledge forward.

Because compassion, to me, isn’t a soft idea or an abstract value. It is the practice of designing experiences that help people feel capable long before they feel confident. It is the willingness to pause, and set others up for success while they are still finding their footing.

< Download the free tool here >

THE GAP

Removing the ego.

If you know someone in a season of transition—interviewing, onboarding, rebuilding, or simply trying to find their footing—send this to them. It’s free. Pass it on.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

There is often a quiet absence of grounding at the start of a project—something not immediately visible, but felt as the work begins to take shape. The design may be considered, even refined, yet it lacks a certain resonance and does not fully connect.

In many cases, this disconnect is not a failure of craft or creativity. I believe it is the result of something far less visible: an audience that was never fully understood.

This moment—often overlooked and underestimated—is where the trajectory of a project is set. Regardless of discipline, whether in product design, brand development, creative direction, or visual communication, the strength of the work is inseparable from the depth of understanding behind it. Every decision, from concept to execution, is influenced by how clearly the audience has been articulated.

Before moving into solutions, it is worth pausing here. What follows are five guiding principles that I believe help bring that understanding into focus—grounded in the foundational practices of effective user research.

<If you’re thinking about revisiting your target audience,
this tool can help you.>

1. Start with behavior
What people say they do and what they actually do are often different. Observing real behavior—how someone navigates a product, makes a decision, or works around a problem—reveals truth. This is where insight begins.

2. Focus on context
A person doesn’t exist in isolation. Their environment, time constraints, tools, and pressures all shape how they engage. Understanding the situation around the user often matters just as much as understanding the user themselves.

3. Identify needs beneath the surface
Requests are often symptoms. A user might ask for speed, simplicity, or clarity—but underneath that is a deeper need: reducing stress, saving time, feeling confident. Good research looks beyond the stated “ask” to uncover what’s actually driving it.

4. Look for patterns
One-off opinions can be loud, but patterns are what guide decisions. When you start to see the same behaviors, frustrations, or motivations repeated, you’re getting closer to something reliable and actionable.

5. Synthesize into clarity
Research is only as valuable as your ability to translate it. The goal isn’t to collect information—it’s to distill it into something usable. Clear audience articulation should guide decisions.

Subscribe now

THE GAP

The gap rarely announces itself at the end of a project. It begins much earlier, in the quiet ambiguity of a loosely defined or insufficiently understood audience. At first, it appears almost negligible—a message that feels slightly off, a feature that nearly works, a visual direction that approaches clarity but doesn’t fully arrive.

These early misalignments do not remain isolated. They carry through the entire process, shaping decisions across strategy, design, and execution, until the final outcome reflects that initial distance from true understanding.

What is often diagnosed as a design issue is, more precisely, a gap in understanding.

When that gap is addressed at the outset—when the audience is thoughtfully and rigorously articulated—it shifts the course of the work entirely. Decisions become more precise, outcomes more resonant, and the work itself more aligned with the reality it is meant to serve.

I believe that design rarely falters in the details alone. More often, it falters at the very beginning.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

I had a conversation earlier this week that I keep coming back to.

It was with a healthcare company that had clear services, strong intent, and a thoughtful system behind what they do. Nothing about their brand ecosystem was “wrong,” but something still felt slightly off in how it was being communicated.

And I think it came down to this: they were very good at explaining what they do, but less clear on how it actually feels to experience it—or more specifically, what it’s like for a real person sitting on the other side of it. At one point, we kept circling back to the importance of human connection.

And the more we talked, the more it felt like this: people don’t really trust what you do until they understand how you do it—and what that means for them in their specific situation. That’s where trust actually lives. Not in the list of services, but in the in-between emotional experience that rarely makes it into the messaging.

After that conversation, I started distilling what I was noticing into five patterns—less as rules, and more as guardrails I return to when working with founders on design and communication systems.

Subscribe now

1. When everything is accurate, but nothing feels like it’s for a person

This shows up a lot in healthcare—and honestly, across most industries as systems become more automated and increasingly AI-assisted. The language is correct, the terminology is precise, and on the surface everything feels technically sound. But there’s often a sense that it could just as easily be describing almost anything—or anyone.

And that’s where the real difference sits. It isn’t about writing “for people” in a broad or generalized way. It’s about whether the language reflects an actual human experience, or whether it only describes the system surrounding it.

2. When the brand can explain the “what,” but avoids the “how”

Most companies can tell you what they do—and how they do it—without hesitation. The gopportunity usually sits in the why. Why does this matter? Why does this outcome exist in the first place? And why does it actually affect a human on the other side of it?

Because “what we do” is easy to package. But “why we do it” is where trust begins to form. It’s messier, more emotional, more specific to the person experiencing it, and less polished in a way that makes it feel more real.

3. When outcomes are clear, but the experience disappears

I am constantly a culprit of this myself: leading with results. Which makes sense—they’re measurable, they feel safe, and, especially in sales or brand positioning, they tend to feel like the most convincing place to start.

But most people aren’t arriving in a new experience looking for the end state first. They’re arriving in a moment of uncertainty, trying to make sense of what comes next. And if all they see is the outcome, you miss the part they’re actually living through right now.

That middle space is where most of the emotional weight sits, and it’s often the part that gets left out. We tend to show the finish line, but rarely the terrain it takes to get there—even though that terrain is the reality people are actually navigating.

4. When expertise is loud, but humanity is quiet

This one is subtle, but I think it might be the most important.

Sometimes brands lean so heavily into credibility that everything starts to feel slightly technical—even in moments where it doesn’t need to be. And I understand why. When you’re building a company, a brand, or even a relationship with an audience, trust becomes the priority, and it’s natural to lead with authority because it feels like the clearest way to earn it.

But authority on its own doesn’t always create a sense of safety. People don’t just want to know that you’re capable—they want to understand what’s behind that capability. They want to feel like there’s something human on the other side of the screen, something that will actually meet them where they are, not just speak from where the brand stands..

5. When it feels like the brand is talking at people instead of to them

Language is one of the most vital aspects of almost everything we interact with.

And the structure of that language is often where a brand reveals what it really is—whether it’s informational, simply telling you things, or relational, inviting you into something with it.

When communication flattens into announcements or explanations alone, something important gets lost in the process: the sense of connection.

< If you’re in the middle of building—or refining—your brand,
I’ve created a set of workbooks here to guide you through
the questions most teams skip. >

THE GAP

I am absolutely a culprit of this myself, and I don’t say that from a place of distance or perfection. Not every project is a grand slam. But over time, I’ve found myself leaning more and more toward something I care deeply about: revealing the experience of a brand, not just explaining it. And I think that comes down to a simple bias I can’t really separate from the work—I care about humanity in it.

In short, most brands know what they’re doing. The challenge is that they become so focused on being clear that they forget to be felt. And the reality is, people don’t build trust from clarity alone. They build it when they can actually see themselves in how you operate, not just what you offer.

Stay Wild,
Adeline

Nik Milanović, founder of Stablecon, is building one of the most thoughtful conferences at the intersection of programmable money and community. What makes it compelling isn’t just the outcome—it’s how he talks about the process.

< Full interview HERE >

This conversation cuts through the polished version of “founder stories” and gets into the reality: the manual, unscalable work, the constant uncertainty, and the small decisions that quietly make or break the experience. From calling himself “the most overpaid admin” to reframing leadership as emotional management, Nik offers a grounded, honest look at what it actually takes to build something people want to show up for.

What makes this interview valuable is how transferable it is. Whether you’re building a conference, a brand, or any kind of platform, the themes are the same: sell the vision constantly, move quickly, stay flexible, and focus on how people feel—not just what you create.

If you’re thinking about building anything from scratch, this is a perspective worth reading.

Stay Wild,

Adeline

As I continue to grow in my career, working with people across industries, I’ve noticed a pattern: the clearer the foundation, the faster and more confidently decisions get made. No one really knows the “right thing” to do, but confidence comes from having guardrails—principles, values, a framework. When those exist, decisions—big and small—fall naturally into place. People stop stalling, stop overthinking, and move forward together, aligned.

I see this clearly when I’m building social collateral. The brief arrives broad—too broad—and at first, it feels like endless possibilities. But then I return to the toolkit: the brand book, the visual language, the tone, the values. These aren’t just guidelines—they are decision-making anchors. Every color, every visual hierarchy, every piece of copy connects back to these principles.

This approach is powerful because it allows me to explain decisions to leadership with clarity. It’s not about personal preference or guesswork; it’s about a thread that runs through every choice and ties back to the bones of the brand. And when the team understands these guardrails, they can make decisions too, without waiting for permission. Everyone operates in the same lane, moving toward the same vision.

THE GAP

The gap is the space between knowing the principles and seeing them guide action. It’s the moment when a decision could go many ways, but the foundation—the guardrails, the values, the brand principles—hasn’t yet fully landed in the choices being made.

It is where clarity emerges. The more you define your base, the more you articulate the “why” behind every choice, the smaller the gap becomes. People begin making decisions with confidence, not because they know the “right” answer, but because they understand the framework guiding them.

The gap isn’t a flaw—it’s where intentionality meets action. And that’s where good decisions turn into aligned, confident outcomes.

Stay Wild,

Adeline